Strength of Sanatana Dharma Tag

Today is Makara Sankranti, celebrated across India to both herald the beginning of longer days, and reap the harvest of months of backbreaking work in the fields. But the greater significance of Makara Sankranti like most Hindu festivals, is to highlight another living instance of the amazing cultural unity of India. People in Karnataka exchange a mixture comprising sugarcane blocks–artistically moulded into various forms and figures and shapes of Gods, Goddesses, flowers, fruits, animals–white sesame seeds, jaggery, and a piece of sugarcane. In Andhra Pradesh, sugarcane is replaced by theRead More

Nilagriva is pretty upset that People are bringing the Veda to everyday life to the extent that soon we’ll have vedic tea, vedic coffee and vedic TV. Why the urge to prefix everything under the sun with vedic? His angst

Head over to Cynical Nerd’s amazing (new) post that savagely rips apart the Indo-US nuclear deal. We argue that the draft legislation is intended to secure United States strategic objectives in South Asia. These do not coincide with Indian security

Swapan Dasgupta, a writer I’ve admired for long writes in the Wall Street Journal about the BJP’s chance of making a fresh start under Nitin Gadkari. It’s really an OK piece compared to Swapan’s more incisive articles. No new insight

Gautam Sen’s scathing piece in the Pioneer, reproduced in full because Pioneer’s links don’t work the next day. Dire and unnerving as the piece is, it is another wake up call, one among the thousands that we continue to ignore

Gross generalizations about a country, a people, and a culture are humourous when done in the lighter vein. In most other cases, they are appalling. If you wonder why Westerners/foreigners are so ill-educated about India, articles like this is the

Preface In an interesting article on Narendra Modi, TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan (link courtesy Nitin) concludes that contextual morality is the one magic explanation for all ills that have plagued India for more than 100 years. He says …Narendra Modi is our

This was published today in the Pioneer. Comments/criticism welcome as always. Preserving national identity As long as the Indian collective consciousness preserved the primacy of Vedic national unity, India could be invaded but not broken. And it is to this

For a backgrounder, please read my introductory post on Mahayana Buddhism. Introduction Shunyavadins were also called Madhyamikas meaning they identified themselves with the Middle Path realized by Buddha during his Nirvana. The Middle Path is named so not only because

Great men are known for greater quirks. So it is with Karunanidhi–I leave his greatness to both your imagination and evaluation. A brief background before this. In the Hindu tradition, one of the ways greatness is measured is by suffixing

This post has adopted Ananda Coomaraswamy’s essay of the same title. I vaguely recall writing in this post, that Coomaraswamy typically wrote “for the professional.” The present essay however, is one of those rare introductory pieces he wrote several decades